2 - The Atlantic Charter and the Post-war International Settlement

Summary

Point 3 of the Atlantic Charter, with its seeming commitment to ‘respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’, and apparent underpinning by the United States, struck an immediate chord in many of the African colonial territories. In Smyth's somewhat over-exuberant estimation, it ‘swept like a grass fire through Africa’. At a stroke, it legitimised what had hitherto been only isolated African demands for self-government, demands which the colonial powers had simply dismissed as radical and immoderate, and laid bare the pretensions of the repeated claim in Allied and French wartime propaganda that the war was being fought for the freedom, or benefit, of all. That claim would now come under particularly close scrutiny as many Africans, particularly in British West Africa, began to ask in turn: ‘What does it mean for us?’ All the more so when Prime Minister Churchill immediately sought to deny the application of Point 3 to the African colonial territories; a denial that made of Africa a clear exception that many Africans would increasingly come to see as having been determined by racial considerations alone.

Increasingly, therefore, as the end of the war hove into sight, self-determination began to emerge as the central question of African political life with, in many colonial territories, corresponding hopes and expectations of what might be achieved in the post-war settlement to come – and, in many cases, though not all, Point 3 would come to represent the political and moral authority upon which demands for self-determination would be based. At the very least, it would serve as the petard upon which the moral authority of colonialism might legitimately be hoist. As Emerson and Kilson therefore pointed out, by the end of the war, there was ‘a substantial body of people no longer content to tolerate the existing colonial situation nor modestly to suggest that they might be accorded some participation in colonial political management’.

How that question would come to be manifested on the ground would ultimately depend on two primary, albeit symbiotic, factors: The general philosophy and approach of the colonial power to colonial governance and the particular circumstances of the individual colonial territories.